Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brillian...ce and refinement from eloquence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail.... Fluenc...y, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact alone that both, like Chatham before them, were great war ministers, links their names inseparably. Beyond that, they sha...red many qualities in common: unquenchable vitality, restless energy, personal magnetism, and an inspiring power of oratory. They were alike also in their defects: opportunism, total lack of consideration for others, and a degree of egotism that can only be termed infantile. Lloyd George, however, whom Lord Haldane once called "an illiterate with an unbalanced mind," lacked both the versatility and the intellectual power of Churchill. Where Sir Winston found relaxation in Macauley or Gibbon, Lloyd George in his prime amused himself with cheap detective fiction. The latter, cast in an inferior mold, lacked also the personal courage of his younger colleague and successor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...the worst horror of the Russian Revolution was the letting loose of one hundred million orators, for their passion for talk was... immediately responsible for all the other horrors ...Oratory prevented Russia from becoming a constitutional country. Oratory tore the Revolution from the patriots and gave it into the bloody hands of the mob. Oratory murdered the Czar, his wife, and their innocent children. Oratory almost wiped out the educated classes. Oratory held the stupid populace spellbound while the Germans invaded the country, boosted Lenine [sic] into power, and paved the way for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I never want to hear any more oratory as long as I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They had their fortunes to make, everything to gain and nothing to lose. They were schooled in and anxious for debates; forcible i...n argument; reckless and brilliant. For them it was but a short and natural step from swaying juries in courtroom battles over the ownership of land to swaying constituents in contests for office. For the lawyer, oratory was the escalator that could lift a political candidate to higher ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purp...ose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Commencement oratory ... must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm... opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fellow delegates, like all of you I've listened in awe and admiration to the magnificent oratory of the honorable Major Cassius St...arbuckle, the cattlemen's mouthpiece, the lowing herds. But seriously, under the spell of his eloquence I could see once again the vast herd of buffalo and savage redskin roaming our beautiful territory with no law to trample them except the law of survival, the law of the tomahawk and the bow and arrow. But then with the westward march of our nation came the pioneer and the buffalo hunter, the adventurous and the bold. And the boldest of these were the cattlemen who seized the wide-open range for their own personal domain, and their law was the law of the hired gun. Now, now today have come the railroads and the people, hard- working citizens, the homesteader, the shopkeeper, the builder of cities. We need roads to join those cities, dams to store up the waters of the Picket Wire, and we need statehood to protect the rights of every man and woman, however humble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead of... persuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »